An Evening with Bob Zellner: Civil Rights Activist

The Equity Project Alliance was honored to welcome Bob Zellner, an active leader in the Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s to today. The son and grandson of Ku Klux Klan members, he risked his life – and nearly lost it – many times in the fight to achieve The Second Emancipation.

As an organizer of The Freedom Rides of 1961 and the first white southerner to serve as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he worked alongside Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, and many other civil rights leaders.

Famous for battles with the KKK, segregationist lynch mobs, and violent police, he is now one of the key individuals that a new generation turns to with questions on the racial, historical, and cultural assumptions on which they were raised, as they ask themselves, “What is my place in this struggle?”